Before she became first Lady Michelle Obama was had a $317,000 job as Vice President of the University of Chicago Medical Center. At her job she helped to create a program where the uninsured get sent to a different hospital. Imagine that, while her husband was pushing universal healthcare Michelle was doing her utmost to make sure the poor didn't come to her hospital. It seems as if the FLOTUS got more than a salary for her work denying health care to the poor. According to The Amateur” author Edward Klein, Dr. Eric Whitaker vice president of the University of...

BOSTON — Last November, Yvette Chappell found herself increasingly anxious that her 27-year-old son, Deshawn James Chappell, was spiraling downward into deep psychosis. He was exhibiting intense paranoia and calling late at night to complain about deafening voices in his head.

One of the most hotly contested ballot measures this election is Proposition 9, pitting victims' rights versus the rights of prison inmates. Recently, Prop. 9's backers took their campaign into unusual territory: right inside the walls of San Quentin prison. Proponents of the ballot measure came together with victims of violent crime and men serving time for their deeds. The event was a daylong symposium held inside the prison's Catholic chapel. "We all as inmates recognize that the victims need rights," said one inmate, while another prisoner said Proposition 9 would "change the rules of the game significantly." Specifically, Proposition...

SAN BERNARDINO - A former sheriff's deputy on trial for shooting an unarmed suspect at the end of a car chase softly cried this afternoon as his attorney pleaded one last time with jurors to acquit him of attempted voluntary manslaughter and assault with a firearm charges. Ivory J. Webb Jr. wiped tears from his eyes as his attorney, Michael Schwartz, finished his closing argument during Webb's trial in San Bernardino Superior Court. In the final words of that argument, Schwartz compared Webb to a bird trapped in a cage, and asked jurors to allow the former deputy to return...

A committal hearing in Melbourne has heard 13 men charged with terrorist offences were committed to violent jihad. The men, who were arrested in late 2005 and early 2006, are facing charges of intentionally being a member of a terrorist organisation. The prosecutor, Mark Dean FC, has told the court in his opening statement the men believed the world was under attack from non-Islamic forces. Mr Dean said one of the defendants, 46-year-old Abdul Benbrika, was their spiritual leader. He said Benbrika had told other members of the group if they wanted to die for jihad they had to do...

THE nation's new anti-terror laws should be torn up and 13 men facing terrorism related charges in a Melbourne court should be dealt with under previous laws, civil rights protesters said today. About 30 members of protest group Civil Rights Defence today gathered at Melbourne's court precinct, where the 13 men accused of being part of a terrorist group will return to a specially convened magistrates court pre-trial hearing. The prosecution case against them was expected to be outlined at their committal hearing this morning. The men, including alleged spiritual leader Abdul Nacer Benbrika, are each charged with being members...

Although homicides reported in New York City last year reached their lowest level since 1963, two killings of police officers late in the year raised public awareness of the problem of illegal guns on the city’s streets. In his inaugural address on Jan. 1, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg declared that a major goal of his second term would be to “rid our streets of guns, and punish all those who possess and traffic in these instruments of death.” Although the total flow of guns into the city is hard to quantify, Police Department statistics show that a majority of illegal...

While much of the country will be focused this week on the highly partisan battles expected during the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, five Milwaukee Democratic activists will be fighting their own battle: They are going to trial for allegedly slashing tires outside a Republican Party office during the 2004 presidential election. The sons of a first-term congresswoman and Milwaukee's former acting mayor are among the five charged with slashing the tires of vans rented by Republicans to drive voters and monitors to the polls on Election Day. Sowande Omokunde, son of Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Wis., and...

More than half a million people were behind bars for drug offenses in the United States at the end of last year, according to numbers from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In a report released Sunday, Prisoners in 2004, the Justice Department number-crunchers found that people sentenced for drug crimes accounted for 21% of state prisoners and 55% of all federal prisoners. This report did not quantify the number of jail inmates doing time on drug charges in 2004, but an earlier BJS report put the percentage of jail inmates doing time for drug crime at 24.7% in 2002. Given...

Police Charge DOD Employee With Child Pornography MERRIFIELD, Va. -- Fairfax County police say 37-year-old Eric Boucher, a financial manager with the Department of Defense, is now facing several counts of child pornography. Authorities said Boucher was arrested Monday at his apartment in Merrifield, Va. Fairfax County police spokesman Richard Henry told News4, "We got a tip last month that he had child pornography at his house and that he was having kids over, giving them illegal narcotics and then taking pictures of them in pornographic poses." Police said the alleged victims were three teenage boys who are minors. Neighbors...

<p>Serious crime in the Big Apple is dropping for the 13th consecutive year despite a shrinking NYPD and the new demand to combat terrorist threats, police statistics show.</p>
<p>For the second consecutive year, murders should remain below 600 - and even rape, which has lately been immune to police initiatives, has finally leveled off with crime overall dropping nearly 6 percent this year.</p>

Illicit drugs are in the news again, with talk of creating safe injection sites in major metropolitan centres, and the potential decriminalization of possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use. These discussions cause me a certain amount of personal turmoil. I have written in this space before about my own negative experiences with substance abuse, as well as my belief that all drugs should be decriminalized and regulated. I continue to struggle to reconcile these apparently opposing views on illicit drugs. I'm not a believer of the 'harmless' theory of marijuana use. I'm one of those guys whose...